Swales, Martin. Epochenbuch Realismus: Romane und Erzahlungen. Berlin: Schmidt, 1997. 204 pp. DM 39.80 paperback. This comprehensive introduction to German realism, which is aimed at a lay audience as well as a scholarly one, problematizes the cliche of a German Sonderweg and takes issue with the common view that German realism, by comparison with European versions (above all French and English), is defined by lacks and failures. Swales points instead to similar elements in the theories of German and European realism that reflect affinities between the fictional traditions themselves: (1) the dichotomy between the prosaic sphere (bound up with social conformity) and poetic impulses (associated with individual resistance and freedom); (2) l'effet de reel (Roland Barthes), or the verbal recapitulation of the material world; and (3) the role of the city-in European realism, the metropolis and in German realism, the Heimatstadt or provincial hometown. Yet the true value of Swales's book as a revisionist study lies in his illumination of the ways in which German realism is distinctive. He demonstrates that the political and cultural idiosyncrasies in Germany's background result in a realist mode that is highly reflective and self-reflexive, concerned throughout with the mental processes that perceive the outer world and shape its narration. His attention to the dynamics of reflection and narration leads Swales to emphasize questions of form and style, a feature that distinguishes his study from those of Erich Auerbach and others who have dismissed German realism as thematically inferior to its European counterparts and links it to Richard Brinkmann's landmark Wirklichkeit und Illusion (first published in 1957) and, more recently, Robert Holub's Reflections of Realism (1991). A further difference between Swales's study and many others is his concentration on the novel (with a few exceptions), which he regards as a more effective vehicle than the Novelle for the social criticism that lies at the heart of the realist enterprise. Following several chapters on the theory and history of realism, Swales presents lucid textual explications of prose works ranging chronologically from Gutzkow's Wally, die Zweiflerin and Immermann's Die Epigonen, both of which he discusses as self-reflexive texts that call the process of narration into question, to Mann's Buddenbrooks, representing in Swales's spectrum the point where inwardness and outwardness, subjectivity and the public realm, are intimately intertwined. …